This good article from today’s New York Times
treats a topic which is not only well known to the New Mobility Agenda program
and its many collaborators around the world, but also touches on some of the
fundamental considerations which constitute the vital underpinnings of the
strategy which will allow us in many ways to cut CO2 radically and provide far
better transportation (better in the larger sense of the word as we understand
it here). When in 2002 our editor in chief was chair of the international jury
of the prestigious Stockholm
Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, he and the jury selected the
International Walk to School program as one of the select group of prize
winners. The award, a striking sculpted glob made of recycled glass, was
presented to Robert Smith as project manager of the UK Walk to School program at that
time, on the understanding that each year it would circulate to another country
program. In time it spanned several continents. The simple fact is that this is
a great and worthy sustainability strategy and should be [art of every new
mobility program in every town and city in the world.

Students Give Up Wheels for Their Own Two
Feet

LECCO, Italy — Each morning, about
450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this
lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local
traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted
by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept:
children should walk to school.

They set up a piedibus (literally
foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a
mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests
lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’
gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now
take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars. Giulio Greppi,
a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he had been driven about a third of a
mile each way until he started taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends
and we feel special because we know it’s good for the environment,” he said.

Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s
piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in
principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the
air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the
United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable
chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school
run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a
national survey showed.

In 1969, 40 percent of students in the United States walked to school; in
2001, the most recent year data was collected, 13 percent did, according to the
federal government’s National Household Travel Survey.

Lecco’s walking bus was the first in Italy, but hundreds have cropped up
elsewhere in Europe and, more recently, in North America to combat the trend.

Towns in France, Britain and elsewhere in Italy have created such routes,
although few are as extensive and long-lasting as Lecco’s. In the United
States, Columbia, Mo.; Marin County, Calif.; and Boulder, Colo., introduced
modest walking-bus programs last year as part of a national effort, Safe
Routes To School, which gives states money to encourage students to walk or
ride their bicycles.

Although carbon dioxide emissions from industry are declining on both
continents, those from transportation account for almost one-third of all
greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States and 22 percent in European Union countries.
Across the globe, but especially in Europe, where European Union countries have
pledged to reduce greenhouse gas production by 2012 under the United Nations’ Kyoto
protocol, there is great pressure to reduce car emissions.

In the United States and in Europe, “multiple threads are warping
traditional school travel and making it harder for kids to walk,” said
Elizabeth Wilson, a transportation researcher at the Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Among those factors are a rise in car ownership; one-child families, often
leery of sending students off to school on their own; cuts in school-bus
service or charges for it as a result of school-budget cutbacks and fuel-price
gyrations; and the decline of neighborhood schools and the rise of school choice,
meaning that students often live farther from where they learn.

In Lecco, car use has proved a tenacious habit even though the piedibus has
caught on. “Cars rule,” said Augosto Piazza, the founder of the city’s program,
an elfin man with shining blue eyes, a bouncing gait and a yellow vest. As he
“drove” along a bus route on a recent morning, store owners waved fondly to the
familiar packs of jabbering children.

Yet as they pulled up to Carducci School, dozens of private cars were parked
helter-skelter for dropoffs in the small plaza outside as gaggles of mothers
chatted on the sidewalk nearby. “I have two kids who go to different schools,
plus their backpacks are so heavy,” said Manuela Corbetta, a mother in a black
jacket and sunglasses, twirling her car keys as she explained why her children
do not make the 15-minute trek. “Sometimes they have 10 notebooks, so walking
really isn’t practical.”

Some children are dropped off by parents on their way to work, and some
others live outside the perimeter of the piedibus’s reach, although there are
collection points at the edge of town for such children. But many live right
along a piedibus route, Mr. Piazza noted.

Yet other parents praised the bus, saying it had helped their children
master street safety and had a ripple effect within the family. “When we go for
shopping you think about walking — you don’t automatically use the car,” said
Luciano Prandoni, a computer programmer who was volunteering on his daughter’s
route.

The city of Lecco contributes roughly $20,000 annually toward organizing and
providing staff members for the piedibus. The students perform a public service
of sorts: they are encouraged to hand out warnings to cars that park illegally
and chastise dog owners who do not clean up.

Naturally some children whine on rainy mornings. Participation drops 20
percent on such days, although it increases during snowfalls. On rainy days,
“She says, ‘Mom, please take me,’ and sometimes I give in,” said Giovanna
Luciano, who lives in the countryside and normally drops her daughter Giulia,
9, at a piedibus pickup point in a parking lot by a cemetery.

To encourage use, children receive fare cards that are punched each day. The
bus routes have distinctive names (the one through the graveyard is the
mortobus), and compete for prizes like pizza parties for the students. Teachers
have students write poems about the piedibus.

In Britain, about half the local school systems now have some sort of
incentives to encourage walking, although generally less formal ones than the
piedibus, said Roger L. Mackett, a professor at the Center for Transport
Studies at University College in London.

“It’s quite a lot of effort to keep it going,” he said. “It’s always easier
to put children in the back of the car. Once you’ve got your two or three cars,
it takes effort not to use them.”

Source
and fair use: This
article originally appeared in the New York Times of 27 March 2009, by their
reporter Elisabeth
Rosenthal. You can view their original article here.
And click here
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